The need for speed is not everything when it comes to successful websites but with hints from Google that it helps with ranking it is something we all should keep an eye. Not only that but testing can show-up areas of your site that can be or should be improved, so it’s a good idea to check and not just once but with anytime you makes changes those changes can have an affect on your visitors experience and if you haven’t done a speed test even what seems a simple change could throw up a bug.

For example we recently did a speed at pingdom. We didn’t’ even go there to test our site but another site we had been asked about but while there we just happened to put one of our domains in. To our surprise the reported took rather longer then we thought it would and when examining the details it show one file was slowing down the response time. Now this was just a simple error where someone had upload one or two images that hadn’t been optimized because the forgot but without the test who knows how long would that site be under-performing ?

As we said speed is not everything the are many things a webmaster has to taken into account and the is little point in running test from one country while your customer come from another. Keep in mind if you have 1000 visitors a day to your site that’s 1000 different experiences and each one will be slightly different for more then 10,000 reasons. Not least the browser they are using and the perhaps 100s optional ways they could have that setup up.

We like Pingdom for the reports it gives and our own experience of using it over time but here’s a decent list for you all to play with. If you want to offer reviews or comments please do so.

http://tools.pingdom.com/

http://loadimpact.com/pageanalyzer.php

http://www.webpagetest.org/test

http://www.uptrends.com/aspx/free-html-site-page-load-check-tool.aspx

http://site-perf.com/

http://www.websitepulse.com/help/tools.php

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

http://www.webslug.info/

http://webwait.com/

http://www.submitplus.com/freeloadtest.php

http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561353-website-speed-test.aspx

http://www.numion.com/stopwatch

http://www.vertain.com/?sst

http://internetsupervision.com

http://www.selfseo.com/website_speed_test.php

http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/speedtester.html

Google Malware Warning

WordPress Users – Check you ceche files for this hack

Ends today – $500 B2B shopping cart for $5 !! $250 cart for $1

Here’s a snipit from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog:

Friday, April 09, 2010 at 11:00 AM
Webmaster Level: All

You may have heard that here at Google we’re obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

I’m sure you’ve seen many articles on this subject but up till now you may not have seen one that opens the door to what this really means for you content. Chasing after these types of articles are hundred of other articles telling people they have to be “into” social media to influence their ranking in all search engines not just google. That clearly is true but care must be taken if you value your ranking in Google.

Look at this situation like a waitor might look at the tables he has to serve in the restrarant. If he has 3 tables demanding food that’s fine but increase that number to 10 and perhaps he’ll struggle, may get confused and his quality of service to each customer mightbe impared, slow and unreliable. You site is the waitor, your visitors are your regular customers. Don’t lose them to grab quick profit from a bus load of out of towners.

A new client to us expressed concern that their site is not getting indexed or ranked as high as they would expect. The is no fixed rules to what people can expect from google but we are always happy to investigate any concerns especially if, as in this case, it’s a chance to impress a new client.  This person seemed to have followed all the rules and some, we tweaked their meta tags and changed a few formatting on their front page but it wasn’ till we got the site on google webmasters centre that we found what might be a key problem, a problem that if dealt with might allow our changes to have a much greater effect.

The area we are talking about is site speed. The client had never taken any real notice of this section as he knew his site was fast, he had invested in this hosting and always took care of things like image size. But Google’s speed rating said otherwise and this is what google works on. While the client was looking at their main pages google look at all of them they find. So although the client though this content was, although rich, were slick to come into the browser. They were wrong in Google’s eyes.

Google Webmaster Speed Rates

At sometime they had added a forum to their site, this wasn’t used that much but the client thought by adding things like  forums, facebook and twitter this and that all helped with ranking. Well sure it does for some but when adding things like forums you have to evaluate what it will do to the overall success of your site.

Forums – forums can be a great benifit to a web site, they can keep a hold on customers and increase brand loyalty but they can also sidetrack site owners. Our client wanted to provide a great experience for his forum users and so his forum included many plugins which pulled content from 3rd party source inclding pulling content every ten minuites from rss news feeds.

When a site pulls data from a 3rd party it can have a big impact on speed of page loading and not just that one page. This is far worse when this is translated to a test by places like google. The reason being Google’s bot itself might add to the overhang by accessing more then one page at the same time.  And so the rating Google has may not reflect the real visitor experiance on your forum but if you are chasing ranking it’s Google you have to impress. This is just another area where Google walks people down a path but fails to fully explain the working of their features.

Care must be taken – think long and hard before adding new sections to your site if it depends on google ranking and think even harder on any plugins you may want to use on your forums. The same is true about banners, each external banner adds to the loading time, try to load them from your server. Check what are the external links on your pages – a lot of software applications like shopping cart include external links in their headers and footers. For example they might include the words “Powered By” with a link or a button. Check where this button is being loaded from, if it’s off site download it and load from your because if they have a problem it becomes your problem. Even Google code like Analytics have an impact on your page loading times.

It’s hard out there in the retail world and business in general is low in some markets. For this reason alone you would think companies who run affiliate programs would make sure their program works it’s hardest to create income, both for merchants & affiliates.  But across the board we are seeing a number of issues which threaten the very nature of affiliate schemes and weaken the ability of web site owners to make money from them.

Perhaps it’s expected that companies decide to trim the percentage they offer as commission. Very much like workers across their world are having to accept low, if any, pay increases. With the threat of unemployment a shadow over their heads perhaps.

Site owners have to keep a close eye on the commissions being offered and shouldn’t be fooled by companies who offer incentives like a competition to win an Ipad while making these cuts to commissions they offer.

Another trick gaining momentum is offering a larger commission for one small range of products while the rest of the product range an almost trivial amount is offered. If you use deep links to the high ranked items it’s fine but if you just rely on site entry links you may think you are getting 10% then a sale commission comes in it could be 1% or even lower.

Products Feeds Fraud

Recently we have noticed a very worrying fraud. At first sight it might be seen as a simple mistake by companies but as more crop up you see it’s gaining in popularity so be warned.  Only affiliates that have a keen eye on the ball and the knowledge to understand how they could be being cheated stop this when using feeds such as csv files exported from affiliate programs. You have to check the product link urls conform to the standard given by the affiliate company. If they don’t and you send buyers to those links you may not get the commission you earned.

Affiliate companies need to be proactive.

We are very surprised that most affiliate companies don’t monitor the links being given out by the companies that use their service. It is after-all to their benefit that all sales are recorded properly. Some even take a slice of the commission too so they are also being cheated. Link fraud is bad enough to deal with and many site owners are resorting to techniques like cookie stuffing to monitor these events but does that get back the commission ? in most case we think not.

All affiliate schemes should check the links being entered in these feeds but if you are a site owner using these files you too should check and in some cases the links are generated by the affiliate system. These should be fine but don’t take it for granted and monitor those too.

We’ve beend using Trailpay on a few sites now for over a year and it’s a very impressive. From the outset we confess niether of our site are the type of site that will take full advantage of what Trial pay has to offer. They are low traffic sites in unique markets.

One site is an auction and we charge $2.00 to validate the membership of each person who wants to sell on this site. We give the option of paypal, card trasaction via RBS and Trialpay. The info below will tell you how Trialpay works but of three we are very keen to get people to use Trailpay to pay for their validation, why? well profit.

For both paypal and RBS we are charged around 5% but if the member chooses Trialpay not only do they get their process free and the discount or offer they choose from Trialpay but also we get commision. That commision ranges from $5.00 to $25.00. So you see it’s, as they say, a nice little earner and helps maintain the site. Here’s a link to Trailpay so you can see for youself what they offer -

TrialPay works with thousands of software, social games and digital goods providers and has served 60 million users across 100 countries. TrialPay invented this ad-funded payment model back in 2006, giving rise to the next wave of online payments and advertising.

The Trialpay Story.

TrialPay was born out of the idea that online stores should be able to do everything done in retail stores—only better.

Lower overhead costs, higher profit margins, promotional messaging, renewal revenue and sophisticated retention techniques were just the beginning of the “virtual” advantage. Building on these advantages, TrialPay’s founders recognized the potential of advertising throughout the online consumer transaction process.

TrialPay began with the Get It Free model, giving shoppers thousands of ways to get their purchases for free by completing an offer from one of their favorite brands. After boosting sales for thousands of online merchants, TrialPay’s founders realized that by using the efficiencies of the Web, they could pair online shoppers with ideal offers at every stage of the purchase process—revolutionizing the concept of transactional advertising.

Using TrialPay, any company selling online (from the Fortune 500 to one-man operations) can significantly increase sales from its current traffic by providing compelling deals to shoppers at ideal intervals. Shoppers get a free product with every purchase, and blue-chip advertisers acquire high-quality customers on a pay-for-performance basis—a model all too rare these days.

The potential demonstrated in the Get It Free model led Atomico, Battery Ventures, Index Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Bob Pittman and several other individual investors to invest in TrialPay in 2006. Three years, 10,000 merchants, 80+ employees and 60 million users later, TrialPay is recognized as the inventor of the “Get It Free” payment method and an innovator in the transactional advertising space.

To see how easy Trialpay is to setup watch this video

Page Rank Checker is a free tool to check Google™ page ranking of any web site pages easily and to display your site’s PageRank™ value on your web pages

Will You Site Focus On One topic?

What is a Membership Web Site?

So what do we mean by identity and control ?

Yes the standard things like domains, your rights to them (or not) fall under identity but as general terms get eaten up as domain names and companies find it harder to register a suitable domain name that will identify them, we’ll also be looking away the standard terms as domain names.

We’ll also be outlining the dangers of allowing yourself to be shepherded by a design company and corralled into their grasp with them having control and you finding it difficult to change suppliers should you feel the need. We feel it’s important for content owners to be in control both over content and supply of that content to the Internet. The very last thing site owners need is to be stuck with a site either up and out of date or slow or a site down and no way to swiftly deal with the problem.

No one knows you business better then you and your staff and so thinking up a good domain name or two should be in your hands, don’t be tempted to leave this to a design company solely. Although giving a list of words and phases is acceptable, the final decision should be left to you the site owner. Don’t be tempted to use less popular domain extensions either and never be convinced to use domain extensions that you are not entitled to use. Here are a few of the extensions available along with their intended use;

• .com represents the word “commercial,” and is the most widely used extension in the world. Most businesses prefer a .com domain name because it is a highly recognized symbol for having a business presence on the Internet.
• .net represents the word “network,” and is most commonly used by Internet service providers, Web-hosting companies or other businesses that are directly involved in the infrastructure of the Internet. Additionally, some businesses choose domain names with a .net extension for their intranet Websites.
• .org represents the word “organization,” and is primarily used by non-profits groups or trade associations.
• .biz is used for small business Web sites, .com is preferred because people expect that.
• .info is for credible resource Web sites and signifies a “resource” web site. It’s the most popular extension beyond .com, .net and .org.
• .mobi (short for “mobile”) is reserved for Web sites built for easy viewing on mobile devices.
• .us is for American Web sites and is the newest extension. It has the largest amount of available names in inventory.
• .cc was originally the country code for Coco’s Keeling Islands. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .bz was originally designated as the country code for Belize, but is now commonly used by small business who can’t get the name they want using the .biz extension. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .tv is for rich content/multi-media Web sites, commonly used within the entertainment or media industry.
• .vg is the country code for the British Virgin Islands. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .ws was originally designated as the country code for Western Samoa, but is now commonly used as an acronym for “Web sites.” It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .name is the only domain extension specifically designed for personal use. It is commonly used for easy to remember e-mail addresses and personal web sites that display photos or personal information about an individual.
• .co.ukis the country codefor United Kingdom. The .co portion of the extension indicates the domain name is for commercial purposes (similar to a standard .com extension). It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country. If you company trade only in the uk you should always try to use this as people looking for uk companies often see it as a comfort sign.
  
• .org.uk is the country code for United Kingdom. The .org portion of the extension indicates the domain name is for an organization. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .me.uk is the country code for United Kingdom. The .me portion of the extension indicates the domain name is for an individual. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .de is the country code for Germany. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country. If you are not a resident and citizen of Germany, the Administrative Contact for this domain name registration will automatically be assigned Network Solutions’ German proxy contact information.
• .euis the country code for the European Union. Registration of .eu domain names requires registrants to meet one of the three eligibility requirements: have a registered office, central administration or principal place of business within the European Community; have an organization established within the European Community without prejudice to the application of national law; or be a natural person resident within the European Community. Alternatively, you can secure the use of a .eu domain name by using Network Solutions .EU Registration Service. Network Solutions Europe, LLC is the registrar for all .eu domain names. Click here for more information.
• .be is the country code for Belgium. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .cnis the country code for China. It may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .com.cnis the country code for China. The .com portion of the extension indicates the domain is for commercial purposes (similar to a standard .com extension). It may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .net.cnis the country code for China. The .net portion of the extension represents the word “network”, and is generally used by internet infrastructure providers. It may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .org.cnis the country code for China. The .org portion of the extension indicates the domain is for an organization. It may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .cn Regional names.There are 34 regional .cn extensions available, for example, .bj.cn. The .bj portion of the extension represents Beijing and the .cn represents China. These extensions may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .twis the country code for Taiwan. It may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .com.twis the country code for Taiwan. The .com portion of the extension indicates the domain is for commercial purposes (similar to a standard .com extension). It may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .org.twis the country code for Taiwan. The .org portion of the extension indicates the domain is for an organization. It may be registered by businesses, organizations and sole proprietorships from any country.
• .at is the country code for Austria. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .com.mx is the country code for Mexico. The .com portion of the extension indicates the domain name is for commercial purposes (similar to a standard .com extension). It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .co.nz is the country code for New Zealand. The .co portion of the extension indicates the domain name is for commercial purposes (similar to a standard .com extension). It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .net.nzis the country code for New Zealand. The .net portion of the extension represents the word “network”, and is generally used by internet infrastructure providers. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .org.nz is the country code for New Zealand. The .org portion of the extension indicates the domain name is for an organization. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .gs is the country code for the South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .tcis the country code for the Turks & Caicos Islands. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .ms is the country code for Montserrat. It is unrestricted and may be registered by anyone, from any country.
• .fm is the country code for Federated States of Micronesia, but is commonly used for FM radio.
• .am is the country code for Armenia, but commonly used for AM radio.
• .la is the country extension for Laos, but also used for Los Angeles, Louisiana or Latin America.
• .us.com is an alternate domain for the United States
• .uk.com is an alternate domain for the United Kingdom
• .eu.com is an alternate domain for the European Union
• .de.com is an alternate domain for Germany

Your aims might fall into more then one of those domain extensions criteria so if you can afford it, and you feel it important to you, then register all types that might apply. But don’t be fooled into having to do that by a 3rd party, in the end your site will stand or fall by it’s content and your ability to drive people to see it. In time someone might set up a similar site with a similar name if you are successful and if you are then you will then have the power to deal with those people. For most people it’s a problem they won’t have but the are time when registering versions of names is important but we say don’t risk that success by funding issues you don’t have to right now, often the money is better spent elsewhere.

As this is just an introduction to the category we’ll not cover everything but hope we gave you enough to come back for further detail later. In the next section we will discuss control, perhaps the most important aspect of your plan if you want a smooth ride to that successful web presence.

Working on it – maybe